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Some sort of medical infrastructure has existed in all modern states and dependent territories. However, healthcare systems that provide legal entitlements to medical care at least for specific groups of the population, and that regulate access to and provision of healthcare on a national level only came into existence at the end of the nineteenth century. In our chapter, we trace the global emergence of healthcare systems and test whether their introduction date is related to a diffusion process through networks of trade, culture or health-related cooperation, or whether it is mainly influenced by domestic medical needs, capabilities, and wealth.

Chapter 7 by Sebastian Haunss examines discursive interactions in the public sphere. It conceptualizes these interactions as discourse networks and uses network analysis to probe whether a powerful discourse coalition drawing on a coherent repertoire of delegitimating arguments developed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Such a coalition would have been required to mobilize support for a Great Transformation of the capitalist market economy. However, the analysis reveals that discourse networks of relevant size and density emerged only in Germany and the United Kingdom. Even in these two countries, the critics of capitalism – mainly journalists and members of the cultural and academic spheres – were unable to form a broader, more powerful discourse coalition held together by an overarching delegitimating master frame.

The concluding chapter by Jennifer Gronau and Sebastian Haunss draws on the concepts of diagnostic, prognostic and motivational framing to integrate the answers of individual chapters to the volume’s key question: Why was there no Great Transformation of the capitalist market economy after the 2008 financial crisis? Gronau and Haunss argue that crisis diagnoses largely focused on actors rather than the capitalist regime as a whole, that even delegitimizers of the regime mostly grounded their critique in ‘classical’ legitimation criteria such as efficiency instead of proposing a new legitimation frame and that no inclusive and powerful coalition emerged to advocate an alternative economic regime. The window of opportunity offered by the crisis had closed before an adequate level of oppositional mobilization was reached.